A modern computer room contains many various pieces of equipment. Generally, each one of these pieces of equipment must be individually powered. Often, computer rooms contain a raised (false) floor to facilitate running cables under the floor to each piece of equipment. Even a medium sized computer room may contain ten to forty pieces of equipment, each one requiring a separate circuit.
In conventional wiring systems, the time the electrician spends on site to perform this wiring is very expensive and time consuming. Standard circuit breaker boxes are often wall mounted, and are used in the wiring of the room.
The electrician will remove knock-outs as required in the bottom of the panel and connect either conduit or flexible "seal tight" cables via appropriate fittings. The "seal tight" cables are essentially a flexible conduit armor which can be fitted with a threaded end connection. The threaded end connection is affixed to the breaker panel. Then, a wire is typically run through the conduit. In some cases, a wire is run through the cable first, but no termination device, such as a circuit breaker, may be installed since it would not pass through the knock-out hole. The knock-out and installation process is very time consuming, and may require many man-days of effort.
To reduce this installation time, some users have installed power distribution units. A typical distribution unit may contain a large transformer, controls, and means for terminating the flexible cables. Here too, cable termination can be extremely time consuming. Therefore, many manufacturers deliver the power distribution unit with the intially specified set of cables already installed. This greatly shortens the time required in the field. However, installing additional cables after this initial installation has proved to be cumbersome because of the layout of the power distribution unit. Some units require knock-outs to be made for such future connections. Other units have holes provided, but still, terminating the cables is a very cumbersome job due to the tight space requirements of a typical unit. Still another unit contains a slotted hole so that cable can be passed through with the wiring already inserted in the cable and with a large device such as a circuit breaker already attached to the end of the cable. However, this is still cumbersome and difficult to install because of the cable termination nut must be very tightly installed. To do so often requires two people--one to hold the cable in place with a vise grip or wrench and to be "under" the knock-out or hole, and the other person to tighten down the nut from the top. Because of the space required for the vise grips, it is difficult to space the cable terminations close together. This creates a conflict with the general layout of prior art units, limits the number of possible cables and usually leads to difficult wiring situations which also require considerable floor space work area. In most cases, because of the tight wiring space and the difficulty of holding the cables while terminating, the unit must be shut down. This is usually unacceptable to the data processing operator.
None of the above-mentioned devices is designed to permit quick, yet safe, secure, attachment of a large number of heavy cables to a cable termination assembly. For example, outlet boxes have a confined space and the wires must be manipulated within this space. Thus, not only is there a limit on the number of cables and wires due to this confined space, the attachment of the cables to the circuit breaker box may still be difficult as the wires in the box must held while the cable is attached to the box. Due to such space limitations, such boxes cannot include means for ensuring an attachment of the cable to the box which is safe and secure enough to be acceptable for large cables. Additionally, this may require two workers as discussed above. Still further, the outlet boxes are not easily modified to accommodate a wide variety of cables, especially those cables for which the box was not initially designed.
Still another serious drawback to presently available circuit breaker boxes is that they are not heavy duty. That is, they are not capable of accommodating a large number of cables in a secure manner. Nor are these boxes designed to be strengthened to accommodate such heavy cables. However, due to the above-discussed limitations, even if these boxes could support heavy cables, the space limitations would prohibit use of such cables if there are a large number of wires involved.
Therefore, there is need for a cable termination assembly that permits a cable to have a cable termination device quickly, safely and expeditiously attached, and then permits such cable/cable termination device unit to be quickly and easily mounted in a cable termination assembly frame along with a multiplicity of other such units.